Contact sports since their early days have caused injuries to the players. Many such sports permit heavy body contact resulting in very dangerous injuries. Although protective equipment is constantly being improved in design, often such protective items have not been effective in preventing injuries. Injuries continue to be serious, frequently cause disabilities, and occasionally are fatal.
The primary goal of protective equipment is to protect the wearer against injury or against aggravation of a previous injury. It is desirable for a player to play his full potential without fear of injury or without fear of magnifying an existing injury. Further, such equipment must be designed so as not to inflict injury upon another player.
Many athletic committees have been formed to establish rules governing equipment specifications and banning dangerous equipment items. Since players, especially in football and hockey, are required to use their hands, arms, and legs to push or block the opposition, protective equipment is encouraged to prevent arm and leg bruises but regulated to prevent such equipment from being used as weapons against an opposing player. Thus various football committees have expressly forbidden the use of any hard or unyielding materials on a player's elbow, forearm, wrist or hand because of the danger of injury to other players unless proper padding is used.
Injuries result mainly from collision with opposing players or with the ground after forceful contact with another player. Often the agent of injury is the hard protective equipment such as the helmet, shoulder pads, and arm, thigh or knee guards worn by the player. The hard striking surface of such protective gear can bring devastating injury if it hits an unprotected area with sufficient force.
Sports have been marred for spectators where key players are injured and miss several games due to the injury. With the limiting of rosters and increased player salaries, it is important to limit injuries and to provide protection to existing injuries permitting the early return of the injured player to the game.
Prior athletic protective gear emphasizes the use of hard coverings over resilient slow recovery foam padding. Shoulder pads, for example, include a shield which rides on some type of a pad mounted on the shoulder and the shield has to ride above the pad to absorb sufficient shock. Therefore, the shield sticks up so as not to conform to the contour of the body and operates in a highly mechanized fashion. Such designs are bulky, heavy, uncomfortable, and expensive and are not effective in distributing blows over a larger area to reduce their effect.
Prior art athletic equipment is rebuilt and reconditioned every year, and if it becomes damaged, it is time consuming and expensive to repair. Further such equipment is not hygienic since the padding absorbs perspiration and cannot be washed regularly. The equipment requires huge locker areas to dry and store.
Such equipment has the further disadvantage of being fixed in design and cannot be adapted to the individual player's needs. Therefore consideration in uniform design cannot be given to the position played by the individual, his size and agility, any prior injuries, and any particularly vulnerable body locations.
A wide variety of pneumatic devices has been proposed and tested over the years in an attempt to improve protective athletic equipment. These devices typically include an inflatable cushion used with some other item of protective equipment. Often these devices have sealed air chambers which merely transfer the shock to the body. Such valveless devices cannot vary the pressure between the air chambers.
In prior art devices incorporating any degree of fluid flow between two or more chambers, communication between chambers is typicaly by means of passageways and/or valves located in the middle of the inflatable device. Such prior devices tend to lose pressure and, as a result, it is inevitable that a "bottoming out" will occur blocking off fluid passage between the chambers and destroying the functional valve of such passageways. When mechanical valving is involved, a loss of internal pressure causes the body to engage the valve, clearly an undesirable situation.
Other prior art pneumatic equipment is made of elastomeric material permitting the pneumatic pad to "balloon" out of shape upon receiving a blow. Such ballooning permits "bottoming out" thereby destroying the principal function of the equipment, i.e. to protect the body from receiving the blow. To date no pneumatic protective device has achieved widespread acceptance or use.
The present invention overcomes the deficiencies of previous equipment by providing a substantially improved pneumatic protective garment. It provides an improved protective guard which complies with equipment regulations, is easy to wear, reduces the weight and bulkiness of prior equipment, is hygienic, is structurally simple and is relatively inexpensive to manufacture. Further, the present invention provides a unique valving to prevent "bottoming out", does not "balloon" out of shape, conforms to the body contour, and is adaptable to the player's needs.